He had something in him–the rich baritone and the gaze that saw all and feared nothing–that suggested God on a day full of promise and threat. OSSIE DAVIS, who died last week in Miami Beach, at 87, ...

SINCE HIS APPEARANCE at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, everyone inside the Beltway has been in a tizzy over Ozzy Osbourne. But today, I’d like to change the subject from Ozzy to Ossie.

Long before Slave Play, decades before Ain’t No Mo, there was Purlie Victorious, the Ossie Davis comedy masterwork that, like those descendant plays, fused broad comedy, satirical minstrelsy, racial ...